A Quick Tech Review

There's something about the motto "Don't be Evil" which really appeals to me. So, I downloaded Google Chrome and started using it as my default browser.

It has some features that I love. A lot. Love A Lot. I love that the address field functions as a search engine. The tabbing is AWESOME. You can drag a tab out of the window to create a new window. You don't have a home page. Instead when you launch the browser it takes you to a window with thumbnails of your most recently visited sites. I LOVE these things.

But it's SO buggy. Loading video often requires a restart of the shockwave process, which was a pain, but worth it.

Now, though, I have a real problem with Yahoo mail. It just will NOT load a message. I have to go to Firefox to check mail. Which means I have Firefox running at the same time as Chrome. Which defeats the purpose of the miraculous tabbing.

I got into this browser in an early stage and now regret it. I'm hooked on the features and irritated by the bugs. I don't want to give up the features in order to not live with the bugs. On the plus side, it's giving me a really good insight into what it's like to be one of our customers.

Blogging for Posterity: My Borderline Marxist Revisioning of Snow White. Part One

I think I've mentioned this before, Snow White, like all the princess stories, is a feminist nightmare. In the original, Snow White is pretty. Which pisses off her stepmother. So she runs away, cooks and cleans for a while. Gets duped in a moment of spectacular gullibility. Dies. Is brought back to life by a kiss. Yay, feminism!

Laney, of course, loves it and demands repeated retellings. So over the past few years I've honed the story from something that began as just a less offensive version into something that is, even for a tree-hugging, lefty-liberal, vegetarian, atheist peacenik like myself, hilariously liberal. I mean, my Snow White is as Marxist as Rush Limbaugh pretends Obama is. It is, in short, a veritable parody of itself and amuses me to no end. I love it. I figured I'd better record it, since in a few years, Laney will stop wanting me to tell it. So, here goes:


Part the First: in which Snow White Gains Awareness of her World.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful baby girl born who had hair as black as ebony, lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow [that surprised you, didn't it? I stuck with the original script for the beginning]. But, oh wasn't it sad? Her Mommy died when she was born. Snow White's Daddy was the king of the land, but he wasn't a really good king. The only thing he loved to do was hunt. So, he spent all his time hunting, and all the kingdom's money on hunting equipment and left poor Snow White to raise herself.

So, Snow White took to wandering about the castle. On some days she'd hang out with the maids and they taught her to clean. For instance, you have to pick the picture frames up to dust and can't just dust around them. And as she helped the cleaning crew, they told her about their lives. They talked about their families and how they celebrated Christmas and how they were worried since there wasn't enough food in the land. The king forbade the commoners from hunting on his land. This made things difficult for the commoners.

And some days she hung out in the kitchen and the cooks taught her to cook. She learned how to make soup out of just vegetables since that's what the cooks used when they made soup at home. There was no meat for the commoners to eat. They told her more about their lives and how worried they were.

But her favorite person to hang out with was the Master of the Hunt, who was named Freddie and who was kind of dreamy. Freddie taught her to ride and how to love the animals on the earth.

One day the king noticed that Snow White was walking around, as neglected teenage girls often are, in a dress that was both too short and too tight. No one had taught Snow White that she needed to replace her dresses when they got too small. The king decided he'd better marry.

Coming tomorrow, Part the Second: In Which Snow White Meets Socialist Dwarves

Sci Fi

When I was a young lass, I thought scifi was really stupid. I was supposed to think scifi was stupid because I was cute and southern and dated boys who wore starched white shirts with khaki shorts. I probably would have been a cheerleader save for my fundamental clutziness (which is not NEARLY as adorable as Hollywood thinks it is). In short, in my youth, I tamped down my inner nerd.

And then I met my friend Maura who introduced me to the wonderful world of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which I loved. By this point, I had tamped down my prediliction for boys in starched white shirts and had embraced my outer nerd to the point that I wanted a Star Fleet Academy bumper sticker for my car (Alas, I never got one... those dark days before the Internet. Also I didn't have a car).

Next month we'll finally come to the end of BSG, which is, in my limited experience, the best scifi I've yet encountered. Soon we'll all know that Helo is the 12th cylon (someone will have to buy me a coke if I'm right about that).

And then what will I do? I just finished Old Man's War and LOVED it. But I think I need a literary scifi mentor. Where do I go now? What will fill the gaping hole left behind by BSG? Whither the next intelligent, thought-provoking scifi for Megbon?

Really good scifi takes all your assumptions about the world you live in, turns them on their side and then makes you question all those assumptions. Which we should all do all the time anyway. What's out there that does all that AND spins a great yarn at the same time?

Is it Dune? Is it really? I went to that movie because Sting was in it. Are there better reasons?

You'd Almost Think These People Knew Each Other

I swear, though, they don't. So the one status is not a comment on the other. But it comes off that way doesn't it?

This might not be as funny as I think it is...

Liars

Meh, who cares. Do you guys think Obama sent Blagojevich a Christmas card? I bet he totally DID! That MUST mean something!

All sarcasm aside, as usual, Atrios sums up exactly how this kind of stuff makes me feel

I'm Growing a Little Obsessed with This Song

And think that my new favorite lyric of all time is "In the barlight/She looked all right/ In the daylight/ She looked desperate"

Another Scary Parenting Thought

I tell the story all the time about how my Dad taught me to read. It's not a warm, fuzzy story. He used Clifford the Big Red Dog books. He determined how much I should read and then if I didn't get there, he wouldn't kiss me good night. Isn't that awful?

It's probably not true. I realized recently, that he probably did that once. One time. I was probably telling him I didn't want to read and being whiney about it. And he was probably tired and irritated and made a poor parenting choice. Or, shoot, maybe he was just kidding.

But, I'm willing to bet this wasn't something that happened repeatedly. I bet I've been hating poor Clifford for years no for no good reason.

Which, of course, makes me think of all the times I've gotten tired and lost my temper and made poor parenting choices. And it would just serve me right if Laney is well into the 30s before she realizes I wasn't always saying "Goddammit, Laney, we're LATE!" That only happened once.

Sigh. With that, I leave you with a little Philip Larkin. Ignore the third stanza. I think he exaggerates. Still, it's a good poem:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.